I agree with many of Richard Ortner's points. Many of us in this forum have in the past, Richard, made the distinction between the 4 year on-campus program and the correspondence program. I'm in a particularly good position to remind MSU's harshest critics of the goodly number of good to excellent MSU correspondence grad wxcasts I've viewed as an AMS Broadcast Board member.
Yes, we all know degreed mets who are incompetent, uncaring, awful representatives of the meteorological profession. And, I can point to a number of MSU correspondence grads who beat such disgraceful performers all to hell, and a few who match up nicely with competent mets. MY point, boring though it apparently is, centers on the bottomless standard for a passing grade in the correspondence program at MSU. Let's say there's much too much academic freedom to pay your money and NOT to be held to some sort of minimal standard.
Again, in my market alone, there are 2 MSU guys working the AM shift who have themselves supered as 'meteorologists'. One thinks POPs refer to areal coverage (60% of us are going to get wet today) which, I suppose, is not terribly amazing owing to our own misunderstandings concerning POPs in past surveys. The other's inadequacy requires a short UNembellished anecdote. When the Galaxy satellite went down at about 6:10pm EDT, we had a 60-62dbz severe cell over northern Erie County. Natch, all the loops stopped. The next morning, this 'meteorologist' kept running the same Kavouras sat and 88-D loops over and over throughout the morning show, mentioning the heavy storms over the Buffalo metro area which, of course, were long since gone. This guy didn't have the slightest intellectual curiosity to call AccuWeather or the NWS to find out why nothing was changing position or why there were no visible storms.
My bottom line: yes...there are incompetents with the B.S. degree, but it INCONCEIVABLE that anyone who graduated -- actually passed his courses -- in ANY 4 year program could be THAT meteorologically dumb.
No one that deficient should have received MSU's Certificate in Bcast Meteorology. There is a unique, bottomless pit of academic standards here which hurts the MSU image, and a few of the MSU on-campus grads are more than a little peeved. These guys shouldn't have passed.
When I told Mark Binkley of such academic horrors, he seemed to nod in agreement that such ignorance got by his faculty. My question remains: What are you going to do about this stuff, Mark?
Don Paul
WIVB, Buffalo